


Red Is For Love

by celeste9



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Fluff, Gardens & Gardening, Getting Together, Language of Flowers, Multi, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-12-10 11:50:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11691039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: The First Order never taught Finn anything about flowers, but BB-8 helped him research until he knew that yellow was for welcome home, for joy and friendship, that pale pink was for sweetness and admiration, that orange was for desire.





	Red Is For Love

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a floriography prompt.

“My parents took up gardening after the war,” Poe said, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, dirt caked beneath his fingernails, kneeling in the damp earth. “My mother was particularly good at it, green thumb, I guess. I picked up a few things.”

Finn dragged the back of his hand across his forehead, certain that he sweated far less attractively than either of his companions. He felt disgusting, not to mention out of place. He didn’t have the first kriffing clue about gardening. “Maybe I should leave it to you and Rey, then. Think I’m just making a mess.”

Not that he wanted to leave all the same. Making a fool of himself was kinda worth it if it meant spending time with Rey and Poe.

Poe was smiling, that soft, fond expression in his eyes that made Finn feel like his insides were melting. He touched his fingers to Finn’s temple. “You’ve made a mess here, anyway.”

Frowning, Finn rubbed at his skin. “What?”

Rey threw a towel at him from the other side of the row they were planting. “You’re making it worse.”

Finn scrubbed at his face with the towel and then peered down at it. It was covered in streaks of dirt. “Oh.”

“It’s okay, buddy,” Poe said, patting the dirt around the bulb he had just placed into the ground. “You improve the scenery.”

Rey was laughing and Finn just stared down at the dirty towel, his skin hot.

-

The Resistance base had moved to a warm, green planet. It wasn’t as hot as D’Qar and it didn’t rain as much, the terrain less jungle-like. It was a good place for growing things. For starting over and building anew, Finn thought sometimes.

Rey’s little garden prospered under her and Poe’s care. Rey spent so much of her free time in it, weeding, watering, pruning her green charges as they grew, every spare moment she wasn’t with Luke. She was a natural, taking to gardening like she hadn’t spent her life in the desert, and she was constantly reading up on it on her datapad, searching for advice, studying. Sometimes when Poe came back from missions he would present her with a new plant, earning Rey’s bubbly enthusiasm and often a kiss on the cheek, which never failed to make him blush.

Finn liked watching them but his thumbs were apparently decidedly brown. Gardening hadn’t exactly been part of his education or training in the First Order and he wasn’t taking to it like Rey.

He liked to sit out there in the mornings or the evenings, though, whenever he was able, especially when Poe was gone, or Rey was busy. Somehow he felt surrounded by them when he sat in the midst of their flowers. 

“You know,” a female voice said, startling Finn out of his thoughts, “it’s usually easier to date people when you tell them you want to date them. In my experience, anyway.”

“Dunno what you mean,” Finn muttered, his ears heating up.

Jess laughed. “Flowers are good. For romancing, I mean. You’ve got a whole plot right here.”

“They’re just friends, that’s all.”

“Now, I know you’re not stupid,” Jess said, patting Finn on the back. “So don’t pretend you are.”

Finn gazed at the vivid colors in the garden, the beautiful bright growing things that Rey loved and that Finn loved because of her, the plants that stretched their leaves towards the sun under Poe’s careful, nurturing touch, every bit as good with a delicate shoot as he was with a green pilot.

Flowers for romancing, Finn thought.

Huh.

-

When Poe arrived back from a trip to Corellia, there was a string of tiny yellow buds hanging from the post of his bed. His smile outshone the flowers by a wide margin. 

When Rey came stumbling into Finn’s room after a session with Luke, sweaty and exhausted, Finn tucked a light pink rosebud behind her ear. Her laugh was breathless and her smile so sweet.

When all three of them collapsed in the same bed after far too close a call, holding each other tight in reassurance, in the morning Finn slid out from their grasp early just so he could fill a vase with vibrant orange flowers to adorn the tray of food he prepared for his sleepy companions. He couldn’t tell if they were more pleased by the nourishment or by the presentation of it.

The First Order never taught Finn anything about flowers, but BB-8 helped him research until he knew that yellow was for welcome home, for joy and friendship, that pale pink was for sweetness and admiration, that orange was for desire. He sent Poe off in his X-wing with a lavender flower tucked into his flight suit, lavender for enchantment, for that moment Poe had smiled at him and said, _we’re gonna do this,_ sweaty and bruised and bloody and so game. He watched Rey pile rocks one on top of the other with only her mind, a peach-colored flower twisted into her hair, peach for gratitude, for the way she had believed in him when no one else ever had.

He took tiny blue flowers and draped them over the back of Poe’s chair, over Rey’s staff where she had left it leaning there, in a moment when he was afraid, when it all felt like nothing would ever come of it, that he would only ever be Finn, the ex-stormtrooper, in love with his best friends, forever out of place. Blue for what could never be, for the impossible, the unattainable. 

There was an especially lovely flower that Poe had found somewhere in the Mid Rim, that Rey gave special attention to in order to help it flourish, with yellow petals tipped with red. This one Finn pruned carefully and gifted to them together once as they lay in the sun, tumbled together. Falling in love, it was meant to symbolize, and Finn thought maybe it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter if nothing ever happened, because he was in love, and they were here, and - 

Poe caught his wrist, his lips curving upward indulgently, that insides-melting look in his eyes. Rey leaned over and pressed her soft lips to Finn’s cheek. 

“There’s a red one, there,” Poe said, his fingers so warm around Finn’s wrist. “My mother always said red was for love.”

That night Finn fell asleep with Rey’s ankles tucked between his calves and Poe’s nose at the back of his neck, his eyes drifting closed with the afterimage of a single red flower on the desk lingering behind his eyelids.

**_End_ **

**Author's Note:**

> I am on Tumblr [here](http://serceleste.tumblr.com). :)


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